The Dark World of Abortion, Part II: Special Treatment

We continue our exclusive series on the Esquirearticle “The Abortion Ministry of Dr. Willie Parker.” “Part I: More Oversight Needed” can be accessed here.

It is hard to believe; however, even in a post-Gosnell world, abortion zealots stand against any and all restrictions on abortion, no matter how sensible. That’s how we know they really don’t care about women. They care about the right to abortion above all. They vehemently oppose even the most reasonable restrictions. Remember when they stood proudly against the partial-birth abortion ban?

Which brings us back to John H. Richardson’s profile of Dr. Parker, because the piece was prompted by the fight over a new Mississippi regulation that would require abortion doctors to have admitting privileges at a local hospital. It seems like a reasonable thing. If something were to go wrong in an abortion, you would want the doctor who performed the abortion to care enough to see that patient through whatever process they must go through at a local hospital. But, no, Dr. Parker apparently has other abortions to get to; he can’t be bothered with that. He gave his sales pitch to eleven young women in one room on the day Richardson was there, and then “move[d] on to another room and another group of women.”

Besides, getting admitting privileges is apparently as hard as getting to the moon. They will have to close the clinic, they say. What is so hard about it? Well, Kay Mitchel, the director of medical staff services at Houston Methodist Hospital and Texas Medical Center, was recently interviewed by a radio station in Austin, Texas, (KUT) where she explained the rigorous process: “The most challenging part for meeting those medical staff standards involves determining whether or not a practitioner is competent to practice, and in what areas.”

That cannot be! They actually have to provide information to determine whether or not they are competent? Simply outrageous! Why would women need a competent abortion doctor? This is wholly unnecessary. Those pro-life extremists are just too much!

Richardson explains the matter this way: “The latest fight is over whether abortion doctors should be required to have admitting privileges at a nearby hospital in the event of a complication, an irrelevant requirement since a hospital’s emergency-room staff usually does the admitting. It’s a practice no other specialty is required to observe.” (Emphasis mine)

There is one big problem with his assertion, though. A simple research of clinic regulations in Mississippi unveils he is deceiving his readers, whether willfully or unintentionally. I compared Mississippi’s “Minimum Standards of Operation for Ambulatory Surgical Facilities” to its “Minimum Standards of Operation for Abortion Facilities” and found they are incredibly similar — to the point that they both have 38 pages and almost 12,000 words each (11,961 and 11,664 respectively). The kicker is that the regulations for surgical facilities (which include those “other specialties” Richardson claims are not required to have admitting privileges), are indeed required to have admitting privileges.

Here is the language from Rule 42.9.7:

Professional Staff. Each facility shall have at all times a designated medical director who shall be a physician and who shall be responsible for the direction and coordination of all medical aspects of facility programs. Each member of the medical staff shall have like privileges in at least one local hospital. (SOURCE: Miss. Code Ann. §41-75-13)

Why the deception? I suspect because the truth is unpersuasive. Few would buy the argument they actually have to make which is that abortion doctors and clinics should get special treatment. They want abortion to continue to receive that special treatment that it has enjoyed since Roe v. Wade. Even the Supreme Court has recognized it. In Gonzalez v. Carhart, the Court had to admit that it had, in the past, made special accommodations within its own interpretative rules when it came to the issue of abortion. Talking about the canon of constitutional avoidance, a rule that encourages every reasonable construction of a law to be resorted to in order to avoid unconstitutionality, it said:

It is true this longstanding maxim of statutory interpretation has, in the past, fallen by the wayside when the Court confronted a statute regulating abortion. The Court at times employed an antagonistic “canon of construction under which in cases involving abortion, a permissible reading of a statute [was] to be avoided at all costs.”

That’s the reality. Abortionists want to be above the law. They want to be treated differently. They should be treated better than other doctors. They believe they should be celebrated for their incredible work, not questioned and held accountable. The sentiment is clearly seen on the sworn testimony of the District Attorney in Pennsylvania in charge of the Gosnell investigation. After realizing the horrendous conditions in which Gosnell was able to practice for years, virtually unsupervised, he concluded by asking, “How is it that we have more oversight … of women’s hair salons and nail salons than we do over abortion clinics?”

The answer, of course, is plain old politics, not women’s health. Concern for women’s health would be happy to make sure doctors are competent by having admitting privileges, but pro-abortion proponents have become so irrational in their support of abortion that they will refuse any type of accountability. They actually want less accountability. They hope for the day that they could have someone other than a doctor perform the abortion. They dream of “Tele-Med” abortions where the physician can just be on a computer monitor.

Increasing the number of abortions is the goal. Why? Because it is their “religion,” for one, or their ministry, as Richardson puts it. But never forget that it also increases their profits. That’s their business, after all.

Author

Mario Díaz, Esq., serves as Concerned Women for America's (CWA) Legal Counsel. Mr. Diaz is a Constitutional Law expert who focuses on CWA's core issues: religious liberty, sanctity of human life, defense of the family, sexual exploitation, education, national sovereignty, and support for Israel. His columns appear regularly in a variety of publications, including The Washington Times, Human Events, WorldNetDaily, American Thinker and The Blaze.

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tomd

“Increasing the number of abortions is the goal.”

This, of course, is incorrect. The goal is to provide as many abortions as needed, no more. And then to work to reduce that need as much as possible.

Which, BTW, pro-choice policies have been more successful at than ‘pro-life’ policies, many of which actually increase the number of abortions.

Starcitygal

Wrong! PP gives out award plaques extolling the increase in abortions over the previous quarter/year. Please put the kool-aid down.

I did. It was my next post. Now it appears below your comment. You posted your comment much later and my attribution was/is very visible. Don’t understand how you missed it.

thisoldspouse

Abortion is a business, and as with any business, its “life” blood is in generating ever newer customers and sales.

You apparently lack any real-world business education, much less common sense.

tomd

The largest provider in the US, Planned Parenthood, is a nonprofit.

Abortion rates have been steadily dropping since the early 80s.

Perhaps you can use your business education and describe who is profiting from this and how big those profits are.

tomd

If an organization has more requests for service than it can fill, which is the case for abortions, it will encourage those parts of the organization that manage to do the most to fulfill as much of that demand as possible. PP likely does the same thing for other services – they don’t look as good on your website, however.

This is like a food bank getting an award for helping the most number of hungry families, and you claiming that that shows the bank is trying to encourage hunger.

There is simply no logic behind the idea that the left “wants to increase the number of abortions” – to what end? Why would that even be a goal?

Nazi monster Dr. Josef Mengele is known to have ordered the murder of over 400,000 Jews at Auschwitz from 1943 to 1945. Thousands more he kept alive and mercilessly tortured to death during experiments intended to create an Aryan super-race.
Much of Mengele’s “medical research” was conducted on children and newborns – especially twins. One witness described what happened after Mengele once delivered a Jewish “fetus”: “But when he saw that there was only one baby and not twins, he tore the baby right out of the mother’s uterus, threw it into an oven and walked away,” she said. “We saw this.”
Cryin’ shame. Were he alive today and working for Planned Parenthood, Mengele’s abortion could have easily yielded an extra $300 for this “intact specimen.” Sell baby’s body parts separately, and the profit margin goes up. That’s good money toward a Lamborghini.
Such a waste.
In 1990 attorney and ...